Back on silver screen, former child star turns to long-suppressed Korean historical trauma
The year Kim Hyang-gi turned 12, she chose to take a break. Her parents had been saying it for years: You can quit acting anytime you want. She had been working since before kindergarten — a bakery commercial at 3 alongside Jung Woo-sung, her feature film debut at 6, steady work after that. By fifth grade, the decision seemed overdue; it was time to be a normal kid.
"I loved hanging out with my friends," she tells reporters at a cafe in Samcheong-dong, Seoul, on Tuesday, putting herself back in that time.
"School was fun. But even with all that, I felt this weird emptiness," Kim, now 25, explains in recalling the moment not long later that put things in perspective. "I wanted to be on set again. That's when I knew I had to keep acting."
Many in Korea know Kim's face as the junior grim reaper from the "Along With the Gods" fantasy blockbuster films whose two installments sold 26 million movie tickets combined. Or maybe from her last role on the big screen in "Hansan: Rising Dragon," the 2022 historical epic where she played a young spy who infiltrates Japanese forces — the only woman lead among a sprawling cast of Joseon-era military commanders and foot soldiers. These are the roles that gave Kim a reputation as one of the most reliable young actors in Korean cinema, along with the kind of visibility that opens doors.
But they also tend to obscure what is actually interesting about her filmography. Between those franchise hits, Kim has been deliberately picking her fights with much heavier, more loaded material.
"Snowy Road" in 2017 cast her as a victim of wartime sexual slavery by Japanese forces. Two years later, she reunited with Jung Woo-sung in "Innocent Witness," where she played a girl with autism. The award-winning performance showed a different side, quieter than the blockbuster buzz but arguably more lasting.
This split — commercial work that pays the bills versus passion projects that test her limits — reflects a trajectory of an actor grappling with who she wants to be. "I had so much anxiety through my early 20s," Kim says. "I'd built this image from childhood, and I kept asking myself whether I should protect that or try to prove I could do other things," Kim says. "The question ate at me."
Her latest project operates squarely in the second category. "Hallan," which opened Wednesday, drops Kim into the Jeju Uprising of 1948, when South Korean forces killed an estimated 30,000 islanders in a brutal anti-communist purge that remained unspoken for decades. Kim plays Ah-jin, a young mother fleeing government troops with her daughter across the mountains and coastline of Jeju Island.
It marks her second time addressing state-sponsored atrocities on the screen, following "Snowy Road," but "Hallan" focuses on something more intimate in scale — on how far maternal instinct can push someone.
Director Ha Myung-mi frames much of the action against Jeju Island's vast stretches of wilderness that make Kim and her 4-year-old co-star Kim Min-chae look impossibly small. The compositions have a painterly quality — human figures dwarfed by nature as much as by history, survival distilled to its rawest form.
"The script just clicked when I read it," Kim says. "Everything flowed. I could picture it all immediately."
Playing a mother at 25 might seem like a stretch, but Kim's given it real thought. "Motherhood isn't this monolithic thing. It was more about understanding this individual — a female diver, a mom who's more like a friend to her daughter."
What fascinated her even more was maternal love as an idea, separate from the character itself. "When you become a parent, they say your hormones literally change. It's biological. That determination to keep going in impossible situations — I wanted to understand where that comes from."
Kim read books on parenting and visited massacre sites that the island's tourists rarely take in. The research that struck deepest came from witness accounts, which included testimonies from now-elderly women who survived the violence. "It was painful to read," she says. "History is usually information, this third-person thing. These were first-person accounts that gave the emotions a more personal dimension."
Viewers have noted how Kim Min-chae, the 4-year-old playing the daughter, bears a striking resemblance to Kim Hyang-gi. Kim visibly warmed up talking about her young co-star.
"She was so shy at first but incredibly sweet. We'd talk about what cartoons she was watching, what foods she liked."
But there's also a pragmatism here, shaped by someone who understands the weight of performance at a young age because she lived through it. "She's a young child, but she's also an actor. I realized that helping too much might burden her. What mattered most was letting her relax enough to do the work she'd prepared."
Kim credits Ha's directing style for helping sustain the film's more emotionally demanding moments. "She wasn't interfering with the acting itself. It was more about creating an environment where I could maintain the emotion, where I felt stable enough to work."
Their first meeting ran three hours — Ha walking through every detail of the production, from locations to costume plans to dialect coaching. "That conversation gave me confidence. I knew we could sit down and talk."
Though jovial and easy in conversation, there is an unyielding seriousness in the way Kim approaches her craft that is hard to miss. She's wary of letting technique overtake instinct, but she has grown more aware of when rational calculation serves the work. "When I was younger, I just dove into the feelings. Now I've learned to think strategically about certain moments," she says. "Not every scene needs to be lived. Sometimes you execute what you've planned."
Asked what roles she wants to tackle next, Kim lets out a laugh. "There are so many I can't even list them all. Right now, I just want to stay healthy."
Then the tone shifts. "With all these platforms and technologies, you can realize so much more on screen now. The possibilities keep expanding.
"But actors have this specific job of making people feel something. That's what we do that machines can't. I think protecting that, keeping that alive, is probably my mission right now."
"Hallan" opens in theaters Wednesday.
moonkihoon@heraldcorp.com
